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404 page for webshop vs 302 redirect

Im the owner of a webshop and we have implemented that products that are not instock are disabled from the shop. My problem is that i have a lot of 404 pages, that right now get redirected to the front page, when the item are not instock. This is because it would hurt the conversion rate if they got a standard 404 page. Customers dont know what a 404 and would click back and choose another competitor. Its really hard to find out what are the best solution and what are not a downrank at google. This has been running like this for 2 years and cant see any negative in the solution regarding seo and so on,

Christian, definitely read the article Keri linked to. Note in the article the section on "Where should you 301 redirect your pages to?"

Whether you 301 them to one of the suggested "most relevant" pages, or 302 them to a custom dynamically generated close matching page higher up in the hierarchy, it's the best practice. 301 would be for products you aren't going to carry. 302s would be for out of stock, as long as the 302 generates a custom message at the top of that page they're pointing to that informs them you're out of stock.

A final consideration would be to create a form below that "sorry, out of stock" message, that invites visitors to be notified by email when a product is back in stock. I've seen that extra functionality save a lot of otherwise lost business.

Oh and 1 additional concept - as in Stephanie's article, the 3rd alternative is keeping the page, informing them its out of stock, and showing them other similar products, right on that page that you may not normally include when something is in stock. Couple that with the "notify me when its in stock" form on the page as well, and that could very well be the best solution.

Thx all of you. The problem is though that we never know if we can get the products again thats why it becomes to heavy load to say to the customer that we will contact the person when the product gets in stock again.

in that situation, my recommendation would be a 302 to the next highest related page in the chain (such as the sub-category page or the category page above it), with the custom "we're sorry but that product is out of stock" message.

If a product doesn't come back in stock over a relatively defined length of time (30 days, 60 days), etc., you should have the policy where the 302 becomes a 301 to that same page, with the same message. It would mean that if a product DOES come back in stock after that, you'd cause some confusion from an SEO algorithm perspective, but it's the right thing to do.

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